Happy 40th Anniversary to Roxy Music’s eighth & final studio album Avalon, originally released May 28, 1982.
There's much to be said about going out on top or at your best. Avalon, Roxy Music's eighth and final studio album is arguably their best effort. When the band reunited in 1978 after an almost three-year hiatus, only three members from the original lineup remained: Bryan Ferry (lead singer), Phil Manzanera (guitar), and Andy Mackay (Saxophone and oboe). The rest of the lineup consisted of a variety of session players that were shuffled in and out.
Without some of the original players, there was a notable change in the sound that we had grown accustomed to. After the great promise of 1975's Siren, there was an expectation that the Manifesto (1979) LP was going to pick up where the previous album left off. Gone were the artsy flourishes and complex arrangements of the band's previous iteration. The result was a sound that many critics did not accept warmly.
In hindsight, Manifesto and the next album Flesh + Blood (1980) were unfairly judged within the broader context of Ferry's solo output from this period, which offered enough breadcrumbs to see where Roxy Music's lead singer and main songwriter was going. The smoother arrangements and the gorgeous musical picture painted by Roxy Music had a lasting effect on the music world. You need to look no further than the more popular bands from the New Romantic era. No shade, but I'm looking at you Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran.
The musical journey Roxy Music had taken led them to the crowned jewel of their catalog, Avalon. It's more than just a great album—it's a mood. Avalon is many things to many people. A friend of mine once called it "make out music for grown folks." Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic had a similar observation, “With its stylish, romantic washes of synthesizers and Bryan Ferry’s elegant, seductive croon, Avalon simultaneously functioned as sophisticated make-out music for yuppies and as the maturation of synth pop.”
The ten tracks on Avalon were originally spawned from an idea Ferry had for the band's next album. "I’ve often thought I should do an album where the songs are all bound together in the style of West Side Story, but it’s always seemed like too much bother to work that way,” Ferry once remarked. “So instead, I have these 10 poems, or short stories, that could, with a bit more work, be fashioned into a novel.”
The great thing about Avalon is that it came together from a bunch of different ideas from everyone involved, all of which informed the creation of a beautiful album that is almost beyond description. Everything seemed to fall into place. Even the title track was recut on the last day of mixing because no one was satisfied with the original version. “Bryan and I popped out for a coffee, and we heard a girl singing in the studio next door,” Manzanera recalled. “It was a Haitian band that had come in to do some demos, and Bryan and I just looked at each other and went 'What a fantastic voice!' That turned out to be Yanick Etienne, who sang all the high stuff on Avalon. She didn't speak a word of English. Her boyfriend, who was the band's manager, came in and translated. And then the next day we mixed it.”
I'm happy that Roxy Music didn't come back and try to catch lightning in a bottle by recording a follow-up LP. Avalon is a great record that checks off all of the important boxes. From songwriting to production to musicianship to engineering, it is sonic heaven. There aren't many bands whose final LP is as good as this one.
Avalon is one of those albums that consistently makes “Best of” or “Greatest Albums” lists and I'm really embarrassed to admit that I left it off my personal “20 Albums I Can't Live Without” list. It was a terrible oversight on my part and someday I hope I'm afforded the opportunity by our editor-in-chief to right this egregious wrong, because Avalon is an album I simply cannot live without.
LISTEN: